


Worthy

by hanzopanzo (floralstiel)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch Era, Body Horror, Broken Bones, Cults, Demon Jesse, Demons, M/M, Rituals, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 02:46:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8310916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floralstiel/pseuds/hanzopanzo
Summary: Blackwatch had a recovery policy of 3 weeks. 3 weeks past the official end point of the mission was when Reyes could send in the big guns and find out what happened. He didn't feel like waiting 3 weeks. He pushed up from his seat and set Blackwatch on unofficial lockdown, no further missions, no further joint ops with Overwatch. Nothing until he got his boy back. He found Jesse in the woods, but he wasn't sure of what he brought back.





	

**Author's Note:**

> My second "catch up" goretober fic!
> 
> Days include:  
> 8\. Ritualistic Sacrifice (nonlethal, in this case)  
> 9\. Monster Form  
> 16\. Painful Transformation  
> 17\. Backstab
> 
> And with this I'm all caught up TAT I should've done fic from the start so much easier than drawing sob;;;

This mission had gone horribly wrong. It started with one of their newer agents acting a little squirrelly as they approached the point, muttering spooked words under his breath, sweaty and terrified. Jesse kept a close eye on him but didn't think much of it. They were all fucking scared. They neared the point and saw the fires, the carved up bodies and sigils and painted blood, and all hell broke out.

The newest agent started screaming, Jesse tried his best to quiet him, the other men became distracted, Jesse resorted to punching the man unconscious, but by then their presence had been announced. Jesse turned and saw a horde of men from the village running toward them, he raised his gun with a curse, and fell with a blow to the head.

 

“What do you mean you can't raise him?” Reyes snarled into the comm.

“We tried, sir, but he's just not responding, none of them are.”

“Dammit,” Reyes slammed the comm down on his desk. A week. It'd been a goddamn week since their last message. Jesse and his unit were to clear out a town of cultists with extreme prejudice. Easy. Shouldn't have taken him more than a day to do, yet it'd been a week now and still nothing.

Blackwatch had a recovery policy of 3 weeks. 3 weeks past the official end point of the mission was when Reyes could send in the big guns and find out what happened. He didn't feel like waiting 3 weeks. He pushed up from his seat and set Blackwatch on unofficial lockdown, no further missions, no further joint ops with Overwatch.

Nothing until he got his boy back.

 

Reyes made landfall about 2 clicks from the village, some illegally built commune in the middle of fucking nowhere in the goddamn woods. He snarled and kicked his way through some tangled branches, starting on a route that would bring him behind the main settlement.

He glanced down at his tracker and smiled thinly. Thank god for small mercies. He'd fitted Jesse with a tracking device, small enough to inject under the skin, it would only show up as a small scar, made of plastics and organic material so it wouldn't show on most scanners. He’d injected it into the back of Jesse’s neck while he was out like a light. Kid’s hair was so long and unruly he doubted Jesse even noticed the new bump on his skin. If Jesse didn't know about it, he'd thank him for it soon enough. The implant deactivated if the host died, so Jesse was still alive, somewhere in that fucking hellhole.

Reyes reached the village by dark. He clicked on his night vision, they primed with a low whine, and he continued into the dark. Looked like no one liked being out after dark, or the village was abandoned. Reyes frowned. His intelligence had told him the commune had at least 50 able bodied men on the premises. Where was everyone? He approached a hut on the edge of the village, listened, then entered slowly. No one was inside. He glanced about, taking in the ropes and hooks, the spilled blood, the heads of a good amount of Jesse’s squad sitting stacked on a shelf like fucking mason jars of preserves. He clenched his jaw and forced himself to look away to examine the rest of the hut. There were signs of an obvious struggle, deep scores in the dirt floor, dug by combat boots and fingers, one hand metal and the other flesh, and they led from the hut back outside. Reyes ducked his head and followed.

Once back outside he could hear a dull thrum, like many murmuring voices or the rumble of waves, a steady ebbing and flowing of sound that pulsed through the clearing in the center of the village. Reyes stalked away from the village, following the sound down a beaten path into the woods. He could make out firelight, torches lined the way once he ventured deeper, and the humming grew louder the more he walked. He stopped and jerked to the side, hurrying off the path and behind the trees. He’d reached a clearing in the wood, dirt stamped flat and hard by hundreds of feet, covered in symbols painted in blood.

The whole commune seemed to be in attendance. Each member held a torch or candle, and they were all muttering words under their breath, though quiet their sheer number amplified the sound to almost unbearable levels. They swayed on their feet, dazed, drugged, drunk, who knew, but they soon parted from the path, and Reyes saw why with a dry mouth and a cold sweat.

He recognized Jesse instantly, naked and dirty, bruised and cut, covered in painted lines of blood, hair clumped and dirty with mud and sweat, and Reyes clenched his fists, forcing himself to wait, to watch. Two men dragged Jesse forward into the clearing and the mob closed around them. They pulled him up onto a stone altar, a wicked thing drenched in old blood, Reyes imagined he could smell it from afar, and Jesse must have been drugged because they didn’t bother to tie him down, they just left him there, sprawled and vulnerable on the rock. His metal arm was missing and Reyes could see his chest hitching as he cried.

The chanting grew in volume, rising to a chaotic roar with highs and lows, screeching and bellowing voices rising in a single chant, words Reyes couldn’t hope to understand, and Jesse writhed. Reyes couldn’t hear him over the others, but he could see Jesse screaming and convulsing, eyes painfully wide and filled with tears.

Reyes would later convince himself this didn’t happen. Jesse rose into the air by a few feet, seizing and contorting until his back snapped. Reyes heard him scream, and the man plummeted back to the rock, somehow still alive despite his broken spine. He wailed and screeched, fat tears and snot ran down his face, mixing with the blood lines and marks on his neck and chest, and they throbbed with ill light. The chanting rose impossibly louder, Reyes felt himself hold his breath, and it suddenly all stopped, leaving silence for a hellish bellow to echo around the clearing. All eyes snapped to the center, where Jesse lay frozen, agonized and broken, and it was so quiet Reyes could hear his sobs, his gasps and the snaps and cracks of his bones popping in and out of place, the sick grinding of his spine returning to its proper shape. 

Except his shape came back wrong. His arms elongated, fleshy globs of skin and bone stubbornly forming in the place of his amputated arm, and the blood marks were glowing. Jesse let loose one last anguished moan as growths sprouted from his forehead, twisted black horns that glistened in the firelight. His body looked inhuman, impossibly black in the extremities, as if they were charred, veins of hellish light lit the blackness, and the new, Jesse-shaped creature rose on unsteady hands and knees and puked black bile, moaning pitifully in the wake of its wretched birth. Reyes wasn’t even sure if that was Jesse anymore.

“The sacrifice has been gifted,” one of the village men cried out. “Speak, Sammael, if this body is worthy!”

Reyes frowned and stepped closer. A twig snapped underfoot and he froze. No one seemed to notice, save Jesse. Reyes locked eyes with him—how his subordinate could see him from the altar was a mystery—and Jesse blinked and started pleading, low and pitiful and ragged. A low rumbling shook the clearing and the cultists around the rock began murmuring in confusion, in worry. Reyes watched, preparing, waiting.

A shockwave of grating sound bellowed from the altar, the stone cracked, and hellfire licked at the underside of Jesse’s belly. He screamed and tried to scramble away, falling heavily to the ground. The cultists surged back and forth, shouting in confusion and fear and the ground beneath their feet cracked and yawned open, swallowing grown men and women whole. Reyes grit his teeth and charged into the din, easily dodging and pushing his way through the crowd to reach Jesse. He scooped him up and ran, eyes on the ground to dodge each new fissure to the abyss below. Jesse was impossibly light.

They left the clearing and the screaming din behind, and Reyes thought he could hear a deep, rumbling voice speaking of disappointment, of hunger, longing, and Jesse cried and screamed through it all into Reyes’s chest plate. Reyes shuffled him around to free an arm and Jesse clung to him tightly, legs and arms wrapping around his body. He was hot as fire. Reyes pulled out his knife, blade glinting wickedly in the fire from Jesse’s body, and they carved their way out of the village. Reyes stabbed one last villager in the back, dragging the knife down until he was satisfied the man was dead, and then they were free, staggering into the darkness of the woods.

The more they ran, the lesser Jesse glowed, and he moaned pitifully as his body started to return to normal, though his new arm and the horns stayed, as did the discoloration of his skin. With one last sickening pop Jesse’s arms and legs were back to normal length and he shuddered, passing out on Reyes’s shoulder. Reyes shifted his weight and kept going.

They reached the extraction point within the hour and Reyes set the beacon. He set Jesse on the ground and he crouched next to him, feeling him over for any wounds or breaks he might’ve missed. He was whole and healthy, with a brand new flesh arm to show for it. Reyes grimaced, glancing at the sky. How would he explain the growth? The horns? Any of it? He dropped his bag and pulled out a blanket, wrapping Jesse as wholly in it as he could. He looked at the horns. They were twisted and dark, but short. He covered them with Jesse’s matted hair and it would to, for now. Jesse stirred and he looked up at Reyes, eyes swimming as he fought back to consciousness.

“G-Gabe…?” He slurred.

“I’m here,” he answered, rubbing his cheek.

“Gabe,” Jesse sobbed, face twisting in anguish. “What…what the _fuck_ …” his voice cracked and gave out.

“We’re safe now,” Reyes shushed him, glancing at the tree line for any sign or movement as he listened to Jesse cry, tried to keep his glowing, black as pitch legs and arms covered.

He heard the chopper before he saw it, and then they were on their way home.

 

“You still haven’t filed a report for that unsanctioned rescue op,” Jack reminded him in the elevator. Reyes grunted in reply and took a step to the side to make room for more agents as they filed in.

“It’s been weeks, Gabe, that’s not like you.”

“Yeah, well, got a lot on my mind,” Reyes frowned, eyeing the wall. Jack sighed and fell back into silence.

Reyes shouldered his way off on his floor and took an immediate left, heading to the Blackwatch medical bay. He passed through the security points, through multiple doors and guards, and finally came to a sealed door at the end. Jesse’s room. He cleared his throat and knocked, waiting.

“Come in.”

Reyes pushed open the door. Jesse was seated at the desk, filing his horns in front of a mirror.

“No matter what I do they keep growing back,” he frowned, setting the file on the desk. “You bring me anything good?”

“Only the best,” Reyes snarked, dropping packages of poptarts and smokes on Jesse’s bed, along with a new comm preloaded with games and movies. Jesse moved to the bed and scooped it up with his taloned, blackened hands and turned it on, scrolling through the titles.

“It’s not much,” Reyes said, scratching the back of his head, “sorry I can’t come down here as often as I’d like. I’d be down here every day if I could, but.”

“I know,” Jesse shrugged, smiling. “It’s fine, really. ‘Preciate what you bring me.”

Reyes nodded and sat next to Jesse.

“Jack’s pressuring me, unofficially but I know he’ll go through the proper channels soon enough.”

Jesse nodded.

“What are you gonna tell him?”

“I’ll think of something,” Reyes sighed. Jesse hummed and leaned against Reyes’s shoulder. He wasn’t as hot as he used to be, but each day with new, experimental treatment his symptoms would not deteriorate, they worsened. His eyes were black now. Not just the pupils and irises, but the sclera as well. His horns, when not filed down, grew longer and longer, twisting up to almost a foot in length—they’d made Jesse leave them be to find that out, and Jesse hated every second of it—and Jesse denied it but Reyes knew they were sensitive.

It was only a matter of time before someone outside of Blackwatch found out about Jesse. It was up to Reyes to keep him safe and out of the wrong hands. His team was still figuring out what happened to him, but some things just defied science, they’d probably never understand what happened or what he was going through, or how his body would continue to change.

Jesse nuzzled into his neck—his filed down horns were impossibly warm and smooth—kissed his pulse, licked and bit his skin, rubbing his whole face against him with soft noises.

“You’re so cold, feels so good,” Jesse murmured. Reyes cupped his cheek and Jesse moaned, leaning back with closed eyes as the older man gripped his head with both hands, rubbing at his sore temples with his thumbs, right at the join of skin and horn. Jesse’s mouth dropped open, easy smile on his lips, slack with pleasure. Reyes kissed those lips and Jesse quickly licked into his mouth, grinning and laughing. He pushed Reyes onto the bed and straddled his hips, all youthful exuberance and humor. Reyes held him, fucked him, listened to him moan and cry out as he came.

He ignored how Jesse’s cum was black, his tongue was black, how Reyes felt more drained than usual when he came inside Jesse’s undulating body, and how Jesse looked like he wanted to keep going. It was difficult for Reyes to think up a good enough reason not to. Jesse licked his lips and pinned Reyes’s arms to the bed, leaning down to nip at his mouth and neck.

“Again,” he hissed. Reyes couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, he could only nod. Jesse grinned.  

 


End file.
